EVERY year, homelessness campaigners sleep rough on a December night to highlight the problems thousands face every day. Reporter AMY BINNS joined them to get a taste of what life on the streets means in East Lancashire.

"PARASITES," he shouted, "-----ing parasites! I've got a job, you get off your backsides and get a job."

Almost blind drunk and unable to understand why we were there, he would have been funny if he hadn't been so angry.

He shouted and swore at the group huddled on the pavement in sleeping bags for more than 10 minutes, bending over the cardboard boxes to scream in our faces until one of the women, who had received police training, calmly moved him away.

He was the first sign of trouble at the sleepout that had begun like a bizarre party with a keyboard player and saxophonist playing carols under the canopy of Blackburn shopping centre, King William Street.

Although it was a dark December night and raining heavily, I had dressed in so many clothes I could barely tie my boot laces.

The volunteers shared pizza and pork pies given by local takeaways and drank flasks of coffee with brandy, taping together shelters of cardboard boxes and decorating them with marker pens.

Most of the revellers - all wearing a lot less clothes than any of us - were happy to put change in our collecting boxes and find out why we were there.

The first drunks, staggering down the stairs leading to nightclubs and urinating against the wall, didn't really bother us, but as the night wore on and we crawled into our sleeping bags for warmth, they grew more aggressive.

After the first, another came to shout at us then urinate on some of the boxes at the edge of the shelter. "There will be murder here, they're looking for a fight," said one lad, but the project workers knew how to handle them and suddenly they were laughing with us. Echoes of a fight near King George's Hall reached us and at 2am, I shifted my cardboard tent closer to a shelter built by Blackburn's Project 66 hostel staff and shared their biscuits.

Liz Stanton, manager of Project 66, said the sleepouts helped her understand what her residents had been through.

She said: "We have our friends around us but the first time you realise you have to sleep outside on your own, it must be terrifying."

The pavement smelled of a thousand fag-ends and worse. Clubbers' shouts echoed round the arcade until it was impossible to tell if it was abuse or laughter. Tired but tense, aching for sleep but jumping at every noise, I dozed on and off as the night grew ever longer. Every time I looked at my watch, it was only 10 minutes later.

As my neighbour said: "You can't relax because you don't know when a boot's going to come through your box."

By 3.30am, I felt so vulnerable, couldn't bear lying down, unable to see what was happening. As I pushed myself up, I felt something puncture my hand. It was only a tiny cut and I quickly saw it was just a piece of broken glass, not a syringe, but suddenly the whole world seemed hostile.

Two of my new friends offered to walk with me to the Nightsafe drop-in centre near Darwen Street to clean my hand. Walking cleared my head and calmed me down and by the time we got back, the square was quiet.

Blackburn shopping arcade isn't a place to fall in love with, but as we sat up against the shutters, it felt almost peaceful. It was still pitch black but, for some reason, two birds had decided it was time to sing.

Abandoning all attempts to sleep as the cold finally started to seep up from the pavement, I sat up to watch the rain until it was time to go home.

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